by Paul Gilster | Mar 1, 2016 | Administrative |
My plan to attend the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop this week fell through when I became ill two days before departure date. Talk about bad timing. TVIW is a wonderful conference, and not only was my son Miles flying in for the event, but I had planned many good conversations with friends in the interstellar community. I was also looking forward to the Homo Stellaris working track led by Robert Hampson. I’ve been at all previous TVIWs and deeply regret having missed this one.
I’m hoping for a less foggy mind by tomorrow, at which point I’ll resume the schedule here, which is four or five posts per week unless interrupted by travel. Complicating this past few days has been a server migration which apparently went well (this, thankfully, was out of my hands), and the need for a PHP upgrade, which should be occurring by the end of the week. Fingers crossed, I am hoping for no disruption. I’ll hope to get some reports from TVIW and pass along links to presentations from the Chattanooga conference as they become available.
by Paul Gilster | Oct 19, 2015 | Administrative |
As mentioned in Friday’s post, I’m taking a week off. The next regular Centauri Dreams post will be on Monday the 26th. In the interim, I’ll check in daily for comment moderation. When I get back, we’ll be starting off with a closer at Jason Wright’s recent paper out of the Glimpsing Heat from Alien Technologies project at Penn State, with a focus on interesting transiting lightcurve signatures and how to distinguish SETI candidates from natural phenomena.
by Paul Gilster | Nov 10, 2014 | Administrative |
I’m at the Tennessee Valley Interstellar Workshop in Oak Ridge for the next few days. As I’ve done at past conferences, I’ll need to spend my time taking the notes that will be turned into next week’s entries here. That means no further posts until Friday, though I’ll try to keep the comment moderation going, perhaps with a few delays. TVIW 2014 has lined up a good group of speakers including, besides MSFC’s Les Johnson himself (TVIW’s founder), exoplanet hunter Sara Seager, beamed sail specialist Jim Benford, the SETI League’s Paul Shuch and TZF founder Marc Millis, along with a healthy representation from Icarus Interstellar. I’m also looking forward to the workshop tracks and will be participating in one called “Language as Reality: A Near-Term Roadmap for Exploiting Opportunities and Natural Experiments Here on Terra Firma to Inform *C*ETI.” Expect a complete report when I get back.
by Paul Gilster | Sep 22, 2014 | Administrative |
A long time ago in what now seems like a different lifetime, a colleague told me that the best parts of any conference were the accidental encounters in the hallways where you ran into old friends or people whose work you knew about but hadn’t yet met. That was back when I was going to conferences about medieval literature rather than starships, but the lesson holds. There were almost too many such encounters at the 100 Year Starship 2014 Symposium in Houston to count, and it seemed that around every corner was a chance to exchange ideas and opinions.
There were also enough tracks and ongoing events that it was impossible to get everything in. Claudio Maccone and I always get together, and when I saw him crossing the lobby of the Hilton Americas hotel, I intercepted him to see if he wanted to join a group of us for dinner. But Claudio was headed for a screening of the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, a film he had never seen, and I could hardly ask him to turn down the opportunity.
Thus the gravitational lens gave way to Gort and Klaatu and Earth’s chance to live in peace among interstellar civilizations or be burned to a cinder for our transgressions. ‘The decision rests with you,’ as Michael Rennie would say. Unlike the later version, it really was a terrific film. And Claudio and I did have the chance to catch up at a breakfast encounter filled with interstellar talk that included the lens at 550 AU and beyond. I’ll have some thoughts on using it for communications on Friday.
Image: My favorite scene in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Interstellar visitor Klaatu (Michael Rennie) adds an equation to Professor Barnhardt’s blackboard, knowing the professor will soon see it.
Which brings me to the reason for the title of today’s post. I’m sure we’ve all had the dream where something is after you and you seem frozen into immobility, knowing you have to do something fast but are unable to act. I found myself in that position this morning. Still worn out from travel and pushed by non-aerospace obligations this afternoon, I fired up the computer intent on a first post about the symposium and an introduction to a week’s worth of musings, technical session notes and other observations about Houston. And then…
Software glitches. Operating system updates (why did I choose this morning of all mornings not to work as usual in Linux but in Windows 7?). The Mac to PC transfer of my session notes left them completely jumbled, which took time to fix. Then Internet connectivity became unpredictable, for reasons unknown. As soon as it came back, I turned to Dropbox to pull my photos from the symposium and discovered that, because I had upgraded my phone to IOS8, DropBox was now unable to download the Houston images. Multiple downloads of Dropbox updates, to no avail (DropBox: Please fix this!). Finally a Googled workaround to get the photos on the PC.
So it was a morning where time stood still. As it did in Dallas on the way to Houston. The clouds in the photo below were the remainder of a system that, the day before, delayed my Dallas-based flight for an interminable four hours. Now I seem to be running perpetually behind schedule, and am pushing up against an outside deadline. So tomorrow I’ll start digging into Houston issues, starting with a conversation between Jill Tarter and Mason Peck that evoked SETI, miniaturized spacecraft, and astrobiological signatures that might be detected by space-based telescopes.
Surely the Earth will start moving normally again and I’ll have fixed the remaining software snags by then. My son Miles said he was walking down the hall when Eric Davis called him over to join a group of colleagues, saying, “We’ve just been talking about whether we’re all living in a simulation.” That was right after a lunch with Al Jackson at a nearby Starbucks where Al explained how Roy Kerr came up with his metric for rotating black holes — Al was there in 1963 when Kerr presented the paper! What’s not to like about a place where you get invited into conversations like this? Houston gave me much to think about and I’ll start digging into it tomorrow.
by Paul Gilster | May 12, 2014 | Administrative |
Over the past months, enough projects have piled up in need of attention that I finally have to decide to get serious about them. That means a short break here. No Centauri Dreams posts this week, therefore, with publication resuming next week on Monday or Tuesday. While I’m putting various things — some space-related, some not — in order, I’ll try to keep up with comment moderation, though it may get sporadic for a time. Meanwhile, do keep plugging into Heath Rezabek’s book survey as we try to isolate not only what books from my shortlist are the most useful, but also search for books you think should be on the list. Please add any titles you think worthwhile in the space provided on the survey form. I look forward to watching this survey grow, and to Heath’s reflections on it once it has grown to sufficient size. See you in a week.
by Paul Gilster | May 28, 2013 | Administrative
Following last week’s highly successful Starship Century conference, I’m looking forward to the Starship Congress coming up in August under the auspices of Icarus Interstellar. Be aware that there is a Kickstarter campaign now in place to support the event and the organization. From the description:
Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit organization dedicated to achieving interstellar spaceflight by the end of the century, will facilitate such a forum as a means for allowing individuals to present and share knowledge and ideas among colleagues within the space exploration community. As an organization run by volunteers, Icarus Interstellar is reaching out to space enthusiasts and supporters to assist in funding this important event, which will incur significant expenses pertaining to venue rental, A/V technical requirements, live streaming of the conference, featured guest speaker travel procurement, and marketing.
I’ve just made my own contribution and hope you’ll consider doing the same. Good luck to our friends at Icarus Interstellar as they move forward with the event. I’m looking forward to seeing many Centauri Dreams readers in Dallas.
